You have a lot of faith in the qualities of average priests.

This priest agrees with you, and has expressed concerns about mediocre homilies that don't speak to the concerns of the particular community: https://youtu.be/pgZXCPCATmc?si=FM4uj2owYBVK_8Mh

> the Vatican would have started publishing standard homilies long ago.

There actually are, but they are famous homilies from famous Church Fathers rather then explicitly produced to be standard homilies.

Take a homily written by someone 2000 miles away and it will likely feel just as relevant to me. Most humans deal with similar issues.

Well maybe they just need to start recording confessionals. Just imagine what Gemini 3.1 could do with 1M tokens of that stuff.

all the homilies i've heard were pre-written but ended with current events... like telling the congregation to not vote for Obama heh. My wife was Catholic until that moment, she never went back after that. This was St. Rita's in Dallas TX.

Homilies are not the core of Catholic mass, the Eucharist is. Protestant churches put more emphasis on the sermon, not sure if it’s all Protestant churches or just “Evangelical” ones

No priest will feed sufficient context about their community into the context window

But they will try, and they'll share a lot of potentially private information in the process.

When I was in formation a couple of years ago, I showed our homiletics instructor a ChatGPT-generated homily for our assigned text. He read through it and put his head on the desk. Then he handed it back to me and said it was as good as good as anything you'd hear from the ambo that Sunday.

By this, he meant that it was ok-but-not-great, and there's a lot of weak preaching out there. And your point is dead on: the text and the assembly are the primary considerations. I preach on the same readings to 4 different masses, but the 4:30 Saturday Vigil folks are a different group than the 11:30 Sunday Morning crowd, so the message is tuned accordingly. Different emphases, different touchstones, differing exhortations, etc.

I was raised Catholic and even though the last time I've been to a church could have been in 2019, I don't remember any priest who wouldn't just gloss over the religious content for the day (copied from an online source), itching to share his politics and the most recent ragebait he's got from Facebook at the end.

There are resources that publish homilies for priests to give. Here is an example for English speakers.

https://associationofcatholicpriests.ie/liturgy/sunday-resou...

the context-specificity problem you're describing is exactly why the draft/execute divide is so persistent across AI use cases.

it's not a model capability problem. it's an architecture problem: the relevant context is distributed across systems (the priest's knowledge of their parish, history, relationships) that nobody has wired into the workflow. a homily generator without that context produces generic output. a priest who knows their community produces something unreplicable.

same pattern shows up in ops work. every ops request looks like a generic task -- 'update contract status,' 'respond to renewal question' -- but the context required to do it well is scattered across CRM, email threads, slack history, billing records. automate the task without the context and you get confident, generic output that's often wrong. the hard problem isn't drafting, it's knowing which context matters for this specific request before you act on it.

Side note, but I've definitely gotten annoyed with "context".

There's context in the strict technical sense - the AI is stateless, you need to get the right tokens to it in the right way, allow it to use tooling calls, etc. I get that. That, is cool. I use agentic coding a lot.

Then there's the sense of what you're saying - you have to feed the AI "enough context". In your case it's critical, but I've seen way too many pro-AI people just dismiss everything and say "context context you didn't give it proper context, have you tried this prompt etc." as a justification for the "lack" of intelligence.

At some point you have to wonder when it becomes unfalsifiable.

Not to mention a massive violation of privacy, which they are subject to as much or more as every other entity that processes privacy sensitive data.

You’re right that a priest can’t (and shouldn’t) dump private pastoral context into a prompt. But context doesn’t have to mean identifiable confession details.

I’m building BibleGuided, and one thing we’re adding is a church feature where congregants can opt in to sharing prayer themes, and leaders can see aggregated and anonymized trends over time rather than identities. That’s enough to shape a homily toward what people are actually struggling with, without violating confidentiality.

If anyone has experience with privacy thresholds (minimum group sizes, differential privacy), I’d love pointers.

Sermon manuals were popular among Catholic priests from the time the printing press started to spread in Europe, and remained so into the middle of the 20th Century.

A parish priest might not deliver a “canned sermon” verbatim, but still rely on one/more sermon manuals heavily when preparing his words for Sunday.

The Roman Catechism (Catechism of the Council of Trent), published by the Vatican and ordered for use in seminaries for core formation of candidates for the priesthood, included a list of specific topics to address for each Sunday of the year. While not a sermon manual as such, those “bullet points” informed Catholic sermons around the world for 300+ years.

Nit: you're confusing the vow of silence with the confessional seal.

Best to skip the priest and feed context directly

"We value your privacy! Do you consent to sharing the contents of your confession with our 2137 partners? [ACCEPT ALL] [MAYBE LATER]"

Pretty sure there are books of homilies.

Very few priests take vows of silence. The standard vows are chastity, obedience and poverty. Even highly contemplative orders like Trappists don’t make a vow of silence - they practice something called monastic silence but it’s not a vow.

The closest thing is that a priest cannot share anything told during the sacrament of reconciliation. But that’s not so much a vow as just the other side of what Catholics believe is a direct connection to god.

We have been further away from OMM 0000 than we are today, that's for sure.

> doing so would be a violation of their vows of silence

I don’t know what this means. There is no formal “vow of silence”. The closest things I can think of are the discipline of avoiding unnecessary speech in some monastic communities, or perhaps the seal of confession, but this doesn’t apply as priests can speak in generalities or anonymously about the kinds of moral issues people struggle with.

> Good homilies are written with the particular community in mind.

That’s a bit of a generalization. Many, if not most, readings simply benefit from clear explanation. Tying in local or cultural context can be helpful, but they can also be a distraction, and mostly, homilies should be about the essential meaning of the readings. By having to write the homily, the celebrant benefits from writing the homily as well, a benefit he would lose if he simply drew from a corpus of prewritten homilies.

I'm glad that priests are well known for always obeying rules and never abusing their position. /s

Bro as a kid I used to go to church every Sunday and I guarantee that not a single person from my entire village understood what the priest was saying, including the priest himself, who was simply reading whatever higher-ups had given him. It was perfect slop because literally nobody cared about the content, it was all form - it needed to sound important and complicated enough to be able to be used in religious rituals. This is an excellent use case for LLMs because they excel at exactly that.

Imagine a bunch of bushmen trying to perform the spell of rain. It doesn't matter what they sing, as long as it sounds like something that could pass as the spell of rain, because the goal here isn't to make rain happen, it's to strengthen the community through shared rituals. 99% of religious activities are exactly this.